PUBLICATIONS
The Rise and Fall of Flint Jack
Sean Lynch & Jorge Satorre
2019
88 pages, hardback , 210 x 140mm
ISBN 9781905462629
Flint Jack was a nineteenth-century vagabond and highly skilled artisan from Yorkshire. He sold fake megalithic axe heads, and ceramic and stone carving forgeries that, despite their lack of historical providence and verification, still populate many museums throughout the UK. This publication expands on Flint Jack’s methodologies, with in depth research uncovering many of his notorious exploits.
An essay by Sean Lynch explores the life and times of Flint Jack, making connections between his oeuvre and dialogues of contemporary sculpture practice. A series of drawings by Jorge Satorre details mischievous behaviour by Jack, recalled from his ramblings around Victorian Britain.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition, The Rise and Fall of Flint Jack by Sean Lynch, at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, as part of Yorkshire Sculpture International.
Bardlore / This is Bardcore
Kevin Barry & Sean Lynch
2019
60 pages, softback with jacket, 165 x 294mm
ISBN 9781912431106
Bardlore / This is Bardcore accompanies Sean Lynch’s 2019 video A Murmur, Repeated, shot in English port city Southampton and nearby Stonehenge featuring actors Gina Moxley and Timmy Creed. Time travel and spirit possession drive a surreal narrative where a bard from seventeenth century Ireland ends up encountering the empty car park of an out-of-business Toys R Us, IBIS hotels and the heritage industry surrounding the Neolithic landscape. Caught between a desire to fit into the constraints of the contemporary world and the seemingly liberal possibilities of a more poetic, distant life of the past, Lynch's central characters grapple with the construction of public space and the role of history in the everyday.
Video images are accompanied by an essay by Kevin Barry, digressing from an overview of bardic culture of Ireland to consider Hollywood screenwriters, Mexican drug lords, and the strange rituals used in the making of verse itself. Designed by Daly & Lyon, this publication features alternate titled covers, each individually rubber-stamped.
Co-published by Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.
Devil in the Detail
2017
40 pages, 170 x 107mm
ISBN 978-0-9926531-9-4
Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition at Ronchini Gallery, London, a selection of artist’s writings describe stories and contexts behind artworks such as Devil In The Detail (2017), Adventure: Capital (2015) and Latoon (2007).
A Walk Through Time / What Is An Apparatus?
2017
80 pages, 343 x 235mm
ISBN 978-1-905397-67-9
Two volumes designed by Wayne Daly are housed in a gatefold plastic sleeve, each dedicated to one of the two bodies of work presented at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.
A Walk Through Time includes 1:1 scale images of photographs taken by the artist of Keith Payne's diorama from the Burren Centre, a tourist attraction in Clare, Ireland. In addition, a detailed text by Michael Hill accompanies a selection of visual depictions of the Tau Cross of Kilnaboy, an ancient stone monument temporarily moved to the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
What Is An Apparatus? comprises of nine script excerpts and images from the video of the same name, developed during the artist’s travels in Europe and North America.
Vancouver Days
2016
54 pages, 230 x 150mm
ISBN 9781927385449
Vancouver Days features Sean Lynch’s writing on some of the people, objects, and ideas influential to his thinking. Swaying between the informative and the anecdotal, topics explored include folklore, public art, newspapers, architectural ornament, and literature. With a keen interest in the offbeat and marginal, each text aims to identify strains of thought that resist the technocracy of western thinking, most particularly in the artist’s native Ireland.
Published by Publication Studio and Charles H. Scott Gallery, as part of the Audain Distinguished Visual Artist Residency Programme at Emily Carr University.
Weight of the World
2016
32 pages, 250 x 175mm
Published by Spacex, Exeter Phoenix and Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented throughout Exeter City in 2016.
Featuring an essay by Joanne Laws.
Bandits Live Comfortably in the Ruins
2016
44 pages, 297 x 230mm
ISBN 978-0-955863-07-3
Bandits Live Comfortably in The Ruins was a curated exhibition presented at Flat Time House, London in 2016. It broadly explored the attitudes that underpin human relationships to the environment.
There is no masterplan of coherence here, or indeed any transcendental experience to be had. Instead, a series of artistic positions, objects and artefacts bargain and improvise through hard-won perseverance and novel invention. This loose grouping proposes no tranquil uniformity or comforts of identifying with history and heritage. Instead, everything constantly mutates, and nothing ever stays the same.
Artists: Seanie Barron, Stephen Brandes, John Carson, Michele Horrigan, Sam Keogh, John Latham, Fiona Marron, Eilis O’Connell, Freek Wambacq and materials from Burke Kennedy Doyle Architects, Country Life Magazine and British Telecom.
SOLD OUT
An accompanying exhibition and publication, Reverse!Pugin, at Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford in 2015 featuring Gabriel Beranger, Kenneth Clark, Diarmuid Gavin, Werner Herzog, Daniel Knorr and more...
Adventure: Capital
2015
8 pages, 370 x 315mm
ISBN 978-0-957625-82-2
Published to coincide with representing Ireland at the 54th Venice Biennale, featuring an essay by curator Woodrow Kernohan.
English / Italian texts
A Blow by Blow Account of Stonecarving in Oxford
2014
144 pages, 266 x 189mm
ISBN 978-1-901352-60-3
Published by Modern Art Oxford &
Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane
A publication designed by Wayne Daly exploring the oeuvre of nineteenth century stonecarvers John and James O’Shea, who shaped monkeys, cats, owls and parrots on buildings in Oxford and Dublin. A photonovel tells a story about the O’Sheas and their many encounters on their travels, and associates their work as being alive with diverse allegorical and sometimes transgressive meanings.
A wide selection of research notes are also published, ranging from Lothar Baumgarten to fried chicken shops, and the first museums of the 17th century to Irish conceptual art, all alongside contributions by Stephen Burke (stonecarver, Dublin), Michael Dempsey & Logan Sisley (Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane), Ben Roberts (Modern Art Oxford), Simon Woodley (Favorite Chicken & Ribs, Essex) and Freek Wambacq (artist, Amsterdam).
Accompanying installation images record the placement of sculptures, photographs, archival material and projections in museums in Dublin and Oxford.
For the Birds
2014
36 pages, hardback, 300 x 240mm
ISBN 978-0-9558630-8-0
An artwork and publication produced with VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art is based upon the Irish myth of Buile Suibhne, or the Frenzy of Sweeney. Set in the year 637 in the midst of tensions between ancient Celtic traditions and the newly arrived Christian domination, Sweeney was cursed to be half-man, half-bird. From that point on, he leapt from place to place, naked, lonely and hungry. At every stop in his flight, he pauses to recite a poem describing the countryside and his unfortunate plight.
Designed by Wayne Daly, featuring installation images, an essay by critic and lecturer Caoimhin Mac Giolla Leith, and contributions on the legacy of Buile Suibhne from Trevor Joyce, Alexandra Bergholm, James G. O’Keefe and Pádraig Ó Riain.
The Use and Abuse of Monuments
2011
24 pages, 210 x 148mm
Consider the functions of these objects: the traditional monument as a site of empowered remembrance or imagined collective expression, the modern sculpture as a signifier of the physicality of space and urbanity, and the contemporary art installation as a shifting social and discursive entity often reactive to audience and context. Beyond the conventions of spectatorship proposed in these definitions, what is determined by daily treatment and active public participation?
Research on this topic is collected here. There is no attempt at a survey or inclusion of all acts of public artistry in Dublin; instead there is identification of a select few where attitudes existing between action and commentary, creation and decay, serenity and disruption are apparent.
Published to coincide with Me Jewel & Darlin', a public art commission for Dublin City Council, sited on O'Connell Street.
A Preliminary Sketch for the Reappearance of HyBrazil
2009
36 pages, 125 x 175mm
ISBN 978-0-9558630-3-5
Co-authored with Matt Packer
The island of HyBrazil first appeared on sailing charts completed by cartographer Angelino Dulcert between 1325 and 1339. Based in Genoa, Dulcert asserted that HyBrazil could be found in the Atlantic Ocean, potentially viewed from the Irish coastline. It remained on maps and charts until 1853, under various pseudonyms such as Insula de Berzil, Illa de brasil, Ui Breasail, or Brazil. Many stories exist of encounters with the island.
A camera, loaded with a role of slide film, was positioned at cliffs on the Aran Islands. It focused to the southwest, on the horizon line of the Atlantic, the purported direction of the island. Each evening, at sunset, photographs were taken at moments where light and shadow suggested a mirage, or potential presence of a landmass.
Views of Dublin
2008
16 pages, 210 x 148mm
Printed matter from an exhibition presented at the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, based upon a series of inter-related events in city in 1965. John Le Carre’s cold war thriller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, was made as a film, and a replica of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie was constructed in Smithfield Market. Actor Richard Burton and his wife Liz Taylor stayed at the Gresham Hotel for ten weeks, attracting much attention. Recollections of these events are today still heard around the city, and the Wall replica is often recalled as an unusual oddity of Dublin architecture.
Sustained research focused on the aftermath of the Wall’s removal. After film production, Bart Cummins, a local scrapdealer, purchased the set in its entirity. He re-erected a watchtower in front of his yard in Inchicore and appeared on national television as the man with the best known replica of the Wall. He gradually sold it off in sections. Some of the material was recycled to rebuild Saint Christopher’s School, the first Travellers’ school in Ireland. Situated in Cherry Orchard at the western edge of Dublin, the school was organised and run independently of the Department of Education by civil rights activist Grattan Puxon.
Yesterday’s Papers: Art and Artists in Irish Newspapers
2008
64 pages, 210 x 275mm
ISBN 978-0-9558630-0-4
Yesterday’s Papers presents an overview of newspaper coverage of art and artists in Ireland in second half of the twentieth century. Press photographs and articles are featured from national dailies and a selection of regional titles. Initially produced as a publication in 2008, pages and information have since featured as large-scale prints in galleries.
With an emphasis on the social realities that cultural production has encountered in Ireland, several topics repeatedly arise: conservative reactions to the introduction of modern art into the country, vandalism of artworks, and the newsworthy character of artists with their many inventive ideas and schemes are all prominent.
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The Stuccowork of Pat McAuliffe of Listowel
2008
36 pages,180 x 156mm
ISBN 978-0-9558630-2-8
Pat McAuliffe lived and worked in Kerry from 1846 to 1921. In a career as a builder he applied exterior plaster, or stucco, upon shop fronts and townhouses.
From the 1870s onwards he began to develop an ambitious and often exuberant style, using a broad range of elements culled from the vocabulary of classical architecture and ornament while exploring an eclectic mix of art nouveau, Celtic and Byzantine influences. This publication features descriptions of some of McAuliffe's remaining facades, along with local anecdotes and the social histories associated with their construction.